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If the netbook ever truly died, it sure didn’t take long for PC makers to resurrect it. Microsoft watched as Apple’s iPads and Google’s Chromebooks ate away at the low-cost computing market those Windows laptops once dominated, but now that the thirst for affordable tablets has slowed, and the capacities of cheap PC hardware have grown, manufacturers are going back to the well.

Business Insider/Jeff Dunn

In today’s context, though, these new machines aren’t reborn netbooks so much as they’re Microsoft’s response to Chromebooks. With their limited storage, modest internals, and dirt cheap MSRPs, they’re meant to be secondary or travel devices, things you’d give to your kid or take on the flight when you want to give your XPS 13 or MacBook Air a breather. And as with Google’s devices, their weak specs push you toward basic tasks in the cloud. You’re mostly using them to browse the web and stream a couple videos.

The difference is that these things run full Windows 10, so, if you need it, you can still use traditional desktop apps like Word and Excel. Now, because Windows still has to work on devices nine times as expensive, these cheaper notebooks aren’t nearly as fast as the best Chromebooks – which are wholly Web-focused – in practice.

But that’s the bet Microsoft is making: Enough people will trade some speed and, in some cases, better hardware for the flexibility and added productivity potential of a desktop OS. That nearly all of these machines come with a free year of Office 365 only solidifies the sales pitch.

All the conceptual ideas noted above still apply here. Nobody will call the Ideapad 100s strong – videos in Microsoft Edge (which tends to run better on Windows 10 than Chrome and such) take a moment to load, gaming is just about impossible, and trying to run more than a handful of apps simultaneously brings the whole thing to its knees. Photo editing isn’t exactly fun, either. That’s what a 1.33GHz Intel Atom processor and 2GB of RAM will do to you.

Use it in moderation, though, and the Ideapad is surprisingly fluid. There’s hardly any lag once everything’s up and running; we could, say, take notes in a large Google Drive doc, browse Business Insider, and stream a 720p YouTube video all at once without much trouble. Desktop apps like Word and Evernote are perfectly agreeable, too. Again, if you need to, you can absolutely get lighter work done on this thing. The performance here is never anything more than “fine,” but it won’t make you tear your hair out. That’s a positive in this market.

While the Ideapad feels swifter than something like the Aspire One Cloudbook, it isn't an immense difference. What sets it apart are its battery life and chassis. The former is very good: about 10-11 hours on a charge with average use. Battery life should always be a plus with such low-power chips, but Lenovo’s made good use of the Atom unit here.

Business Insider/Jeff Dunn

The Ideapad’s design is its biggest selling point. For the most part, and especially from the outside, it comes off more expensive than it is. Its colorful frame is fun and sturdy, and its smooth matte finish doesn’t get destroyed by fingerprints. It’s superbly light and compact as well.Its display neatly folds to a 180-degree angle, too, which is a clever way around the unsurprisingly poor viewing angles on its 1366x768 TN screen. If objects look washed out (and they will), just push the whole thing back. The rest of the panel, by the way, is serviceable. It’s not sharp, and its colors don’t pop, but it’s bright and accurate enough to be better than what’s on most sub-$200 Windows machines.

There are a couple of quirks worth noting, though. In many ways, the Ideapad’s keyboard and trackpad are great. The former is fast, spacious, and comfortable, especially for an 11-inch device, but it flexes a ton. Whole chunks of the board spring up and down as you type, always reminding you that you’re using something cheap. Still, outside of that annoyance, it’s very good.

The trackpad, meanwhile, is accurate, but doesn’t support multi-touch gestures. That means no pinch-to-zoom, two-fingered scrolling, or anything like that. Even for an ultra-budget machine, this is a truly strange omission.

There are other ways the Ideapad feels $170: The keyboard has no backlight, both USB ports are 2.0 instead of 3.0, the speakers and webcam are rough, and only 17GB of the stated 32GB of flash storage are usable out of the box. (You can help that with a microSD card, at least.)

For what it is, though, the Lenovo Ideapad 100s works well for casual users or frequent travelers. If you can live without Windows, we’d still recommend a Chromebook to most – the performance gains are noticeable, and Chrome can do more than you might think. If you can’t, though, this is a good value.

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